not your actual mom,” Colby said with a shrug, no hesitation at all. “And no matter how fine she is, it’s not going to be the same as your family together and whole.”
Meg stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, putting a hand up to her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words tripping over one another in their rush to get out of her mouth. “God, I must sound so spoiled to you, complaining about all this stuff when both my parents are—” She broke off.
Colby shrugged. “It’s not a contest,” he said easily, though she thought he might have flinched.
You could talk to me about it, she wanted to tell him. You could tell me the rest of the truth. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she said instead.
Colby grinned at that. “I’m really glad I’m here, too.”
She took his hand as they went back into the restaurant, the zing of the contact all the way up her arm and the skin of her back and stomach prickling inside her clothes. Having him here in person, his actual physical body beside her, was half-pleasurable and half-maddening, like the moment before a sneeze.
“There you are,” her dad said, slinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing. Meg only smiled in reply.
They were just finishing dessert when her phone dinged in her purse. So?? Emily said. Is he here???
Meg took a deep breath and looked across the table at Colby. “Okay,” she said, “you want to meet my friends?”
Twenty-Eight
Meg
Em and Mason were hanging out with a bunch of their friends at Liberty Park, a big outdoor mall with a movie theater, a bowling alley, and a million shops and restaurants. “Listen,” Meg said, taking Colby’s hand as they strolled down a fake-cobblestone walkway hung with old-fashioned string lights and crowded with couples on dates and clusters of college kids already home for the summer, “just so you know, Em can be kind of a tough crowd.”
Colby glanced at her sidelong, lips twisting. “You know,” he said, “I kind of got that impression.”
“I don’t think she’ll be a bitch to you or anything, but—” She broke off. That wasn’t true, strictly; in fact, she thought there was at least a 50 percent chance Emily would be a bitch to him. “Maybe just don’t take anything she says personally, that’s all.”
“Noted,” Colby said. He squeezed her hand and bumped their shoulders together, easy, though she could tell from the tone of his voice he was a little bit tense. “It’s fine, Meg.” He grinned. “Anyway, I’m really tough.”
“Oh, right.” She smiled back at him, she couldn’t help it, his eyes and his jawline and how tangible he was, here in her town, where she lived. “My mistake.”
Her friends were sitting on the patio outside the fancy ice cream place, an indie situation with flavors like herbal chai and ginger molasses that Meg normally loved but that seemed faintly ridiculous to her with Colby by her side. “Hey!” she called, her voice just a little too loud.
Emily looked up from her waffle cone, her eyes widening faintly at the sight of them. Then she tilted her head to the side. “Hi!” she called, hopping up out of her chair and offering a megawatt smile. “You must be Colby.”
Colby smiled back. “You must be Emily.”
“My reputation precedes me, I see,” Em said grandly, then motioned him over. “Come here so I can interrogate you at great length about your intentions, please and thanks.”
Colby shot Meg a sort of helpless look, but he did what Em told him, sitting down in the empty chair beside her and gamely answering her string of cheerful questions. She was trying, Meg realized; both of them were trying, because both of them cared about her. She didn’t actually think she could ask for anything more than that.
“Cones are on me,” she announced, kicking gently at Colby’s chair on her way into the ice cream shop. She grinned at Emily once before she went.
Half an hour later, Meg balanced on the patio railing, the warm night air ruffling her ponytail as she listened to Emily tell Colby the story of the time they’d accidentally locked themselves in the student council storage room at Overbrook without their cell phones. She couldn’t believe how well this was going. She’d expected things to be awkward between Colby and her friends, hostile even, but instead it was like they’d all known each other for ages. Maybe she’d been worried for nothing after all.